Holographic Convergence_A Space Fantasy Page 15

  “And you’re just trying to watch out for your parents,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “All right, I can do a binding for that. I understand family loyalty.”

  She definitely did. She took it to a level I didn’t know if I could—but then, maybe doing her father’s bidding was more than loyalty. From what I’d heard, the King might not have any problem punishing his daughter for her disobedience, and a man as ruthless as he might punish even his own flesh and blood severely.

  “And I can promise to whatever you want me to as well.” I didn’t add ‘within reason.’ The princess and I were understanding each other.

  “Then let’s do it and get it over with.”

  “Let’s.”

  She stood and so did I. We moved to the middle of the cabin. She leaned against a seat on one side of the aisle, I did the same across from her.

  Before I thought things through, I took her hands. She startled, but allowed it, and I tried not to look like I’d done it without meaning to.

  She stared straight into my eyes, and I thought I’d lose myself to the constantly moving swirls in her irises. Nebulae drifted across them, like clouds moving lazily across the sky in a soft breeze.

  She repeated what I’d already agreed to, and then I did the same with her, remembering the words Tanus and Dolpheus had used to bind the villagers and Aletox.

  I sensed the moment when the binding locked into place and took hold of us. It was as if a cord stretched between our eyes and bound me to her.

  I was already connected to her in ways far beyond what two humans ordinarily shared. This must be what identical twins felt like, and why they were so deeply connected to one another. Here was a person that might really understand me, the woman no one had ever understood. Tanus had been the first one to come close.

  “I’d like us to be friends,” I said, verbalizing the wish I was feeling before wondering whether or not it was wise.

  She regarded me longer than it took to seal the binding between us. For so long that I started to feel vulnerable and stupid for wishing such a thing, and wanted to retract my words.

  But my words were out in the open, where I couldn’t retrieve them.

  Finally, after so long that I was fighting the instinct to flee her scrutiny, she squeezed my hands, and said, “I’d like that. I’ve never had a friend before.”

  A big weight lifted from my chest. “Neither have I.”

  I smiled with all the hope my words implied. I might have been born on Earth, but perhaps I was finally finding the place where I really belonged.

  22

  Yudelle was definitely more than a tech consultant, no matter what she said, and I found myself wishing we had the time to get to the bottom of her fortune and influence. We breezed through Cairo’s private airport as if we were royalty here on Earth. Just as when we arrived in the United States, no one approached us to check our passports or ask for visas, which was a good thing, because I didn’t figure the princess had either.

  We’d descended from the plane and gone straight from the stairs to a waiting car. The driver closed our doors, loaded my parents’ tote bag into the trunk, slid in the front seat, and we were off, not a second wasted.

  From there it was a long litany of Mom commenting on all her firsts. Given that she and Dad didn’t leave Chicago often, there were a lot of them. She’d never been to Egypt before, and she’d never been to a city anything like Cairo. She’d never seen more than two people on a moped, and here she saw several. She nearly had a panic attack when a family with children wove past us in traffic on their moped, two parents and three children hanging on for their lives. We even saw a few men transporting bread on large, flat planks of wood they carried while they pedaled their bicycles.

  We hadn’t even arrived at Yudelle’s underground lair yet, and already Mom looked as if she couldn’t take much more stimulus. Her brown hair had escaped its twist all over her head, and her eyes darted left and right, as if she were following the movements of a fast-paced video game.

  “Mom, you have to relax,” I said as we finally headed out of the city.

  “Who says I’m not relaxed?”

  “I do, you look like you’re about to jump out of your skin.”

  “Well I’m not, I’m just enjoying the sights.”

  “And what about when that family drove by us on the moped?”

  “Well that’s different. That was just outrageous. That should be forbidden. Did you see that little child barely hanging on to the back of the seat? It’s a miracle he didn’t fall off.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean, Mom. You’re all nervous for this kid all over again.”

  “And why shouldn’t I be? Someone has to think about the boy, obviously his parents weren’t.”

  “Marcia,” Dad said, “let it go.”

  “Now don’t you go telling me not to think about a poor innocent boy too.”

  “It’s not that I’m telling you not to think of the boy, my darling, I’m telling you to take into account that life is quite different here.”

  “That much is obvious. That father would have been arrested in a heartbeat in Chicago.”

  “You’re right, he would have. But we’re not in Chicago anymore, Dorothy.”

  I smiled while Mom admonished, “Don’t you go Dorothying me, Jack.”

  “But it’s true, my darling. That family leads a very different life than we do, than most people in Chicago do. Even if we haven’t left the Earth yet, we’re already in a different world. That family probably travels that way every day. Just try to let it go and enjoy the sights.”

  Mom harrumphed, dropped Dad’s hand, and crossed her arms over her chest.

  He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “Try at least, all right?”

  She didn’t say anything, but I could tell his kiss mollified her somewhat. Before long, she was too distracted by all the firsts she was experiencing to worry about the boy she could do nothing about.

  I said, “Just wait until we get to Yudelle’s underground lair slash bunker slash lab. You’ll blow your top when you see it.”

  “Really? What’s it like?” When she turned toward me, her eyes were glassy and excited.

  “Like you stepped out of your life and entered a futuristic Bond movie.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Oh yeah, it’s slick and modern, with gadgets everywhere. You’ll love it.”

  “I’m sure I will. I’ve always wanted to be a Bond girl, maybe I’ll still get my chance, huh, Jack?”

  “You’re already my Bond girl.”

  Yuck. I was glad Mom was starting to let loose a bit more, but ew. They were doing the googly-eyed thing with each other. I pretended to be very interested by the endless stretches of dirt that surrounded us.

  I didn’t look back until Mom asked, “Will we have the chance to see the pyramids? With this Pyramid Power Event, they’re on the news every day. I’d love to see them in person. Maybe we’ll even see light stream out of them like those lucky tourists who were here that day.”

  “No,” the princess said, “we have to leave right away.”

  “That’s a real shame. Oh well. To think that after all these hundreds and hundreds of years, with no one knowing exactly what they were for, and then bam, light pops out of them. It’s amazing. I wonder what happened.”

  I grinned, knowing I held the ace that would blow her mind open all the way. “I know what happened. I was there.”

  She turned so fast that I worried she might get whiplash. She stared at me, Dad stared at me, and Jordan started to laugh. Then we all turned to him. “Sorry,” he said, “it’s just that your faces, it’s funny. Sorry, go ahead.”

  “What happened, sweetheart?” Mom asked. “Tell me please.”

  Mom looked like a kid being told she had to wait to open her birthday presents until the next day. She couldn’t wait, and that only made me want to draw it out all the more. “The Pyramid Power Event, as the world’s
calling it, is how the Princess and Jordan knew where to find us, isn’t that right?”

  “It sure is,” Jordan said. “Ilara felt that we should come here, so were already in the area, but then she heard Tanus calling her.”

  “Tanus?” Dad said. “I don’t understand.”

  I took over before Jordan could give everything away and ruin my fun. “Tanus called to Ilara through the pyramid.”

  “Wait, what?” Mom said, looking appropriately flabbergasted for a suburban woman who just discovered that the alien man her daughter loved used a pyramid to communicate.

  “Tanus called to Ilara through the pyramid.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my hearing, young lady. I obviously meant what do you mean. Explain.”

  “Tanus is the one who powered up the pyramid.”

  “Your Tanus?”

  “Yes, my Tanus.” I liked to think of him that way, actually.

  “Are you telling me he’s the one responsible for the Pyramid Power Event?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”

  “What is he?” Mom asked, her voice lowering to a conspiratorial whisper. “Some kind of... I don’t know what, superhero?”

  “No, he’s human, just like you and me.” I was at least ninety-percent certain he was human.

  “Then how did he do it? No one else has been able to do something like that.”

  “I doubt anyone’s tried.”

  Dad said, “He called out to this other Ilara, when you say he loves you. Why?”

  The Princess sat stoically next to Jordan. I suspected she was hiding the emotions bubbling inside. She’d been exiled to an alien world, waiting for the man she loved to find her. I imagined the anguish I would’ve felt had I been in her shnazzy boots.

  I stopped teasing my mom and tried to wrap up the discussion, for the Princess’ sake. “Tanus called out to the Princess on Origins too. He’d been trying to find her since she left. I think I probably responded to his calls for her, even though I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing at the time. When I came along, he believed I was actually her, and he stopped calling out for her, until his father, Aletox, suggested to us I wasn’t. That’s when he started calling out to her again to see if she would respond, to see if she was still out there. That’s the main reason we traveled back to Earth, to find her. To see if there even was a her, or if there was just me, and I was the real princess.”

  “Wow, honey,” Dad said, “that’s intense. It can’t have been easy to watch the man you’d grown to love try to find another woman.”

  “No, it wasn’t.” I wasn’t about to say more, not in the present company. But Ilara captured my gaze.

  The cosmos of her eyes settled, and I believed we understood each other. The events that had delivered us to this place hadn’t been particularly easy on either one of us.

  But we were made of the same stock. It’d take a lot more than galactic confusion and mishaps to bring us down.

  She nodded at me. It was only a fraction of an inch, but it was enough. I nodded back. Had anyone been looking at us then, they wouldn’t have realized what we were doing. But it was then that we forged a real alliance. Not before, not even with the bindings. It was in that moment, when we understood that life had been shit—but not without its roses—for both of us that we silently agreed to let the past be the past, and the future harmonious and hopeful.

  Jordan yanked us out of the moment. “Wait, where are we? I don’t recognize this place.”

  I didn’t know how he expected to recognize anything around here. There was parched, bare desert, lots and lots of it, stretches of it behind and ahead of us. It was just as it’d been when we’d first traveled to the underground lair.

  “It looks the same to me,” I said.

  The Princess looked out the windows, trying to orient herself. “To me too,” she said.

  “No,” he affirmed, “we’re not headed toward the lab.” He knocked on the partition that separated us from the driver. It lowered.

  “Yes sir?” the driver said in heavily accented English.

  “Where are you taking us?”

  “To a specific set of coordinates the Lady Yudelle ordered me to deliver you. She said she would meet you there.”

  “To do what?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, I wasn’t provided with that information.”

  “I see. How far away are we from the location?”

  “We will arrive there in forty-one minutes, sir.” He was reading from a GPS.

  “All right, thank you. That will be all.”

  “Yes, sir.” The driver closed the partition again, and Jordan looked first to the Princess and then to me. We knew what that meant.

  “What is it?” Dad said. “Why are you looking at each other like that?”

  “Because,” Jordan said, “we think that means that we’re going straight to the site Yudelle has designated for our shuttle launch.”

  “So soon?”

  “I think so.”

  “There’s nothing else that needs to be prepared for outer space travel?” Dad sounded nervous, and Mom looked on with wide eyes.

  “It seems not.”

  I added, “Yudelle has been preparing to travel to Origins for a long time.” I omitted just how long. “And she’s smart, really smart. If she thinks we’re ready to go, then we must be.”

  Mom nodded and gulped. Dad squeezed her hand.

  “You must remember,” the Princess said, “there is urgency concerning our return. With my father ill and unwaking, and me gone, it’s important that we get back as soon as possible. Yudelle understands this.”

  “I understand,” Dad said. “We’re ready.”

  But Dad and Mom looked far from ready.

  I just wanted to get it over with. If traveling in Yudelle’s space shuttle was anything like traveling in Aletox’s, the sooner we got it over with, the better. Because after we did, I swore I’d never step foot in one of these transport machines again. They’d almost killed us on the way here. Now we had to make it back.

  I was a firm believer in ripping the bandage off in one quick motion. “It’ll be good to get this part of it over. This is the hardest part. Once it’s done, you can begin to enjoy Planet Origins.”

  I hoped with every speck of my being that I was telling the truth and that I wasn’t leading my parents across the universe to the biggest mistake of their lives.

  23

  As with Yudelle’s underground bunker, the launch site was concealed from prying eyes and circling satellites. When the driver left the main road, I still hadn’t spotted our destination. We were nearly upon it before I made out the huge cavernous structure, perfectly concealed by the surrounding landscape.

  Before entering, the driver stopped at an invisible gate and put his hand into a socket barely distinguishable from the pockmarked rock that surrounded it. Lights flashed within, then the driver removed his hand, put his window back up, and pulled into the gargantuan cavern.

  Mom’s eyes were wider than I’d ever seen them before, and Dad’s weren’t all that different. I didn’t imagine they understood exactly what they were agreeing to when they said they’d travel off planet with me. Well, if they changed their minds, there was still time for them to back out. Yudelle would see them back home to Chicago if I asked her to. Even if she was no longer on Earth, her henchmen would carry out her orders.

  Maybe it was a good thing that my parents were overwhelmed. Better to be overwhelmed now when they could still back out than when hurtling through space.

  A slight whirring sounded behind us and I turned to see a wall closing. From the inside, the wall was shiny stainless steel, but I knew that from the outside it would have been manipulated to look like any other outcropping of rock in the desert.

  Yudelle thought of every detail, and executed every one of her steps punctiliously. All but the one. I couldn’t see her abandoning Tanus as a boy as anything less than a miscalculation, but maybe I was wrong. Yu
delle had seemed upset about how things had turned out with Tanus, yet she didn’t seem like the type of person that made mistakes. Then again, I needed to remember that when she’d left O, she’d been a much younger, pregnant woman. The woman I was seeing now was centuries older and wiser.

  My life had changed so much over the last few days as to be nearly unrecognizable. I imagined how much might’ve changed over hundreds of years and promised myself that I’d cut Yudelle a little slack.

  She was already coming to meet us before the driver came to a complete stop next to several other vehicles. Even crossing a secret launch site, the woman oozed power and control. Her clothing was expensive, and it moved with her body, one that still radiated the strength of youth.

  When the driver saw Yudelle, he jumped out of the car and pulled open the doors for us.

  “Good, you’ve finally arrived,” she called. “We’ve been waiting.”

  I thought we’d done a good job of returning quickly, considering the complexity of what we’d had to accomplish. We hadn’t set about crossing off to-dos from a checklist, we’d closed lives like cops did cases.

  Jordan allowed the Princess to get out first, then my mom and dad. I followed. Yudelle approached my parents, hand outstretched, all business. “I’m Yudelle.”

  “I’m Jack, and this is Marcia, my wife. We’re Ilara’s parents. Well, we’re Ilara from, er, Earth’s parents.” Dad shook Yudelle’s hand.

  “Yes, I’m aware. I understand that you’ll be joining your daughter in traveling to Origins.”

  “That’s correct.” Dad sounded confident again. Maybe Yudelle’s assuredness was rubbing off on him. Even Mom was standing taller.

  “Then follow me. We don’t have much time.”

  “What’s the big hurry?” I asked. Jordan moved to stand next to me.

  “We’re about to launch an unauthorized space transport vehicle. No one knows about this site—yet. But they will just as soon as I launch this shuttle into the sky. We need to maximize our time of relative invisibility so that we can break free of the atmosphere before they can do anything to stop us.”